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Students Go Local for Expertise in Global Business Problems

ISTANBUL — Two years ago, Steven Becker was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nicaragua. Next year he will be working for Chevron.

Next year, Mike Peng will be in Beijing, helping to invest the endowments of some of the leading U.S. universities. Both are students at Yale University’s School of Management.

But on a crisp morning in March, they were in a classroom at Koc University’s campus on the outskirts of Istanbul, set in a pine grove high above the Black Sea. They were listening to Ahmet Erelcin, head of HSBC’s Turkish private equity division, explain how his country had survived a banking crisis and financial meltdown more than 10 years ago.

Also in class were two graduates from the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, a São Paolo university: Carine Bastos, who works at the central bank, and Mariam Irie, who works on the ethics and compliance committee at the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly in São Paolo.

What brought them together was Istanbul Immersion Week, organized by the Global Network for Advanced Management, a group of 22 business schools that share research, teaching materials and students.

“We were looking for a more intelligent way of responding to globalization,” said David Bach, a former dean at IE Business School in Madrid, who is now in charge of Yale’s executive M.B.A. and global programs. He said they were moving away from a traditional model, in which one school might pay another to set up a module, or two schools might have an exchange, but students would not have a chance to mingle.

Instead the network is built around the idea of local expertise in a global world.

“It makes no sense to pretend that you have all the knowledge in one place,” Mr. Bach said. “Offering your own course is the only price of entry. This year we had five schools, each offering a weeklong program on a topic where they have special expertise.”

In the inaugural session, students from Yale, Koc, Getúlio Vargas, IE, and the Renmin University of China were given a choice of five courses on five campuses. Those who went to Yale, in New Haven, Connecticut, studied behavioral finance, while IE offered an introduction to the European economic crisis. At Getúlio Vargas, visitors learned about marketing to low-income consumers — a crucial market across Latin America — while Renmin focused on China’s entrepreneurial culture and its success in emerging markets.

In Istanbul the students learned how to cope with crises. “In the U.K. before 2008 a banker could retire without seeing a single crisis,” said Mr. Erelcin of HSBC. “I’ve seen 20 crises here in the past 25 years. I know how to act.”

For the Brazilian visitors, much of the material was familiar. “We need to know how Turkey coped with its crisis in order to understand the crises in Brazil,” Ms. Bastos said.

Just as the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the United States in 2008 led to an economic meltdown in Europe, so the decision by Russia to default on its debts in 1998 led to financial collapse in Brazil, said Luís Felipe Teixeira, another Vargas graduate, who works for General Motors in São Paulo. “I never realized there were so many similarities between Brazil and Turkey,” he said. “We also had a period of hyperinflation.”

For the Americans, the week was more about noticing differences. “We don’t get enough about developing economies,” said Harsh Gupta, an Indian native who grew up in Atlanta and did his undergraduate degree at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “When I graduate I want to work in other countries — not just the U.S. and India. Also I’ve heard great things about Istanbul, and I’d never been.”

Nate Hundt, a Washington native who worked as a volunteer on President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, followed by a stint with the U.S. Department of the Interior, said he had decided to come to Istanbul “because I was in Israel last year, and I wanted a different perspective on a similar region.”

Mr. Peng, the Yale student, graduated from Peking University and then worked as a management consultant. “I had spent 26 years in China, and I wanted to work in different regions,” he said. “In China we haven’t had any financial crises since I was born. But we also have problems with inflation, and like the Turks we don’t trust the figures the government gives out. So it’s interesting to learn about a country that has gone through a crisis and come out the other side.”

For Jason Koster, the week offered a chance to catch up with a classmate from Tulane University in New Orleans and gain some new insights. “My friend’s family own a textile company here,” he said, referring to a venture in Istanbul.

An afternoon spent listening to Semih Yalman, a former vice president of Dogus Holding — a family-owned conglomerate that includes one of the largest banks in Turkey, as well as hotels, television and radio channels, construction companies and automobile dealerships — gave Mr. Koster “a better sense of how a family-owned business in an emerging economy operates.”

Mr. Yalman, a thin, intense man with a shaved head who went from selling Gillette razors to planning strategy and media for a multibillion-dollar corporation, recounted his own version of Turkey’s rise from the ashes of economic collapse. As he spoke, the assigned reading — a slightly dry Harvard Business School case about his company’s change in management — came alive. When he described the company’s decision to promote the national basketball team by commissioning the pop song “12 Dev Adam” (12 Giant Men), he was interrupted by Imge Su Aral, a Koc student from Adana, a city in south central Anatolia. “That song was huge!” she said.

That kind of local perspective was exactly what the immersion week was designed for. “I would argue that a Harvard or Yale case written about Indonesia will never be the same as an Indonesian case written about Indonesia,” Mr. Bach said. “We wanted students to be mixed together in the classroom, so they can see that the way people in another country or another culture react to situations may be very different from the way you would react.”